Thursday, 1 December 2016

There’s no way Co-Owner Of
A Lonely Heart should be Episode 4 of the first series of Class.

Sorry, but we need to get
that out of our system immediately. This first part of a two-part rematch with
Episode 1 villains the Shadowkin should be the Series 2 opener. It has the
scope, the emotional (ahem) heartbeat and the landmark events you’d need to kick
off a series, and what’s probably more important, it would have given the
Shadowkin enough of a break from our screens that we’d actually welcome their
return. Three episodes since they last stomped on-screen, killed some people
and stomped right off again, it feels far too soon, evoking both the sense of
‘How can we miss you if you won’t go away?’ and, more worryingly, the idea in
viewers’ minds that maybe writer Patrick Ness hasn’t got as many great ideas
for the series as it was starting to look like he might have. You book a return
engagement with fan-favourite villains or those that seem to have more to say.
The Shadowkin have yet to prove they’re either of those things, so once you
know what the episode is about, there’s every chance you’ll stiffen against it.

That would be a shame,
because as an episode, it’s packed with great stuff, and it allows Sophie
Hopkins as ‘nice girl’ April MacLean to really show us what she’s made of,
impressing us and leaving us wanting more of her in the second half of this
story.

The storyline deals with
the consequences of the first episode, in which April and Corakinus, the
ShadowKing, ended up sharing a single human heart through a space-time rift. It
beats just as many times as a normal human heart would, but it has to sustain
both of them on different sides of the galaxy. Let’s ignore, for the sake of
science fiction, the fact that assuming April had a normal resting heart rate,
at half that rate, both of them should be weak as kittens, prone to fatigue and
fainting, potentially brain dead and not up to invading anywhere but the grave.
The shared heart works, for reasons that were never made at all clear, like
Harry Potter’s scar, allowing April to see the ShadowKing from time to time,
and even allowing him to take over her mind and body. What it doesn’t allow him
to do is have any idea where the hell she actually is. If he knew that, he’d
come stomping back and try to force the heart to obey only him.

This episode is rich and
layered, as April’s once-suicidal, drive-off-the-motorway-leaving-his-wife-in-a-wheelchair
dad gets out of prison and comes looking for his family…just at the point when
April’s in the grip of a severe bout of PSM (Post-Shadowking Mania), and she
threatens him with scimitars. So there’s a degree of backstory development
here, and Hopkins delivers the rage – infused with Shadowkin, but ultimately
entirely human – that April usually keeps supressed, with a dose of snarling
relish on at least a couple of occasions. In between them, there’s some of the
cheesiest, most awkward ‘Shall we have sex now then?’ dialogue you’re likely to
hear in one lifetime and some fairly good, tender post-coital stuff as April
and Ram get it on – and are then promptly discovered by April’s mum.

At the same time, we do learn
quite a lot more than we already knew about the Shadowkin – their belief system
is essentially that they’re a universal mistake and should never have been born
in a universe of light. That’s going to give you quite a hefty chip on your
craggy, ‘Honest, I swear we’re not Pyroviles’ shoulder, and so they want to
destroy everything but themselves. It’s an effective motivation for an
otherwise convenient stompy monster, and when the ShadowKing gets influenced by
April’s actions, he quickly mates with the scientist trying to help him secure
the heart in his body, promising her a seat at his side if she succeeds.

As it turns out, the heart
of a human teenager can feed back into the brain of a mighty ShadowKing – which
is probably meant to remind us how remarkable a teenager April is, but also
runs the risk of making us ponder how naff the Shadowkin just might be.

Alongside all of this, we
have another storyline developing, which will go on to take a degree of
precedence in Episode 5. There’s a new headteacher at Coal Hill, the gloriously
named Pooky Quesnel as Dorothea Ames. And goodness me, but she’s creepy. She’s
halfway between Kate Stewart and Dolores Umbridge, and she’s been appointed on
behalf of the Governors – the body which, in the previous episode, sent an
android from ‘OFSTED’ to observe Miss Quill’s classes. This lot are quite aware
of Quill and Charlie, and right about now, they need Quill’s help.

They need her help for a
very specific reason – while the Shadowkin represent one strand of monster behaviour,
inasmuch as they’re big, and stompy, and will stab you to death soon as look at
you (no idle statement, as we know from their first visit to Earth), they’re
not exactly as insidious as their name suggests. Whereas the other alien threat
in Episode 4 – that’s properly insidious. And hungry. Unbeatable numbers and an
appetite for blood make the other threat in this episode just as deadly, if not
moreso, and it’s certainly the one that Ames and the Governors are out to stop,
and they intend to use Quill, and her influence on Charlie with his cabinet of
souls to do it. Oh yes, the cabinet of souls? It’s a weapon, as well as an
afterlife. So…that’s convenient.

As Charlie gets more
authoritarian in his treatment of Quill, and his friends, including Matteusz
and Tanya, start questioning the values of his Rhodian civilisation, April’s
battle with her half-hearted nature comes to a peak when she’s confronted again
by her father. Saved from killing him by arguments from Ram and her mother
about who she is, who she wants to be, and the importance of carving her own
path, April leaves the man who ruined her life alive – and goes in search of
the ShadowKing, to settle their dispute once and for all, Ram foolishly,
impulsively, and probably more than a little inspired by the fact that his
relationship with April has just entered a new phase, leaps after her, leaving
us wondering at the end of this episode how, if at all, they’ll ever get back.

And the other threat, the
quiet one, keeps on coming.

Co-Owner Of A Lonely Heart
is, as we’ve said, a really rich, well-textured, well-acted episode of Class.
It just really shouldn’t be Episode 4 of Series 1. It’s good enough to be the
launch episode of a second series, and by being placed so soon in the first run
after the initial Shadowkin story, both the episode and the series feel much
weaker than they are. Series creator Patrick Ness is a good writer – he’s
proved that with all four of the first episodes of this series. But by giving
the Shadowkin a return engagement so soon, he does himself and his series no
favours, despite Co-Owner Of A Lonely Heart being a highly watchable episode of
an increasingly watchable show.